Innehållsförteckning för June 2023 från Miniature Wargames

TOO OLD TO ROCK AND ROLL Welcome readers: this issue has a phenomenal spread: as I love games at shows I have been trying hard recently to showcase them in the magazine and this month is no exception. On that basis we have Nihon Shugi (the Sino-Japanese War and aimed for Partizan); Myths & Monsters (at Salute though here with an Arab twist); and those are both backed by an actual Salute report plus loads more: an Indian Mutiny campaign, Chain of Command and Army Painter Speed Painting from Kevin Dallimore. After last month’s shot of a figure (on a model trike) that I’m using on the table-top as me, I thought an actual shot of me on the trike wouldn’t go amiss this time. As Ian Anderson sang: “The…

◗ Martin Bowman ◗ Pen and Sword (2022) ◗ £25 ◗ 253 pages (hardback) ◗ ISBN:9781526705525 ◗ pen-and-sword.co.uk This book is almost exclusively personal accounts by Bomber Command aircrew of their experiences of the air assault on Berlin, broadly from September 1941 to September 1943, interspersed with accounts by German aircrew, flak gunners, and civilians. There are some technical details, but the emphasis is on the human drama: from memory, over half of Bomber aircrew did not survive the war, and Berlin was a well-defended target. Some wartime diary accounts can be glib or ‘understated’ to make an impact, but the stories told here are measured, reflective and honest. It is an immensely sad story, on both sides: the sheer scale of destruction visited on the city, and the constant…

◗ Richard Jeynes ◗ Helion (2023) ◗ £25 ◗ 104 pages (softback) ◗ ISBN:9781915113832 ◗ helion.co.uk Time to dig out the Airfix Sahara Fort… This is an excellent sweep of the French forts in Morocco in the early 1920s, covering not just the fortifications (from major fort to tiny watchtower) but also the garrisons in terms of men, equipment, logistics, tactics and example actions. At first glance, £25 might seem excessive for just 100 pages, but around a third of the book comprises high-quality plans, maps and photos, including the results of archaeological digs. The text is interesting and informative, but – as is so often the case with Helion – showing no signs of proofreading or editing; you have to read some sentences several times to make sense of…

◗ Wilhelm Ramming (edited by Christopher Pringle) ◗ Helion (2023) ◗ £35 ◗ 555 pages (softback) ◗ ISBN:9781915113801 ◗ helion.co.uk This work is a translation of the Austrian official history of the Austro-Hungarian 1849 Summer Campaign, but the editor has sensibly incorporated additional material to provide a more balanced analysis: the author (a senior serving Austrian officer, who later fought as a corps commander in 1866) was often reticent about criticising fellow officers. Both sides were a mixture of regular and irregular forces, well described here in terms of organisation and characteristics. A particular benefit of the book is the 22 maps: some are operational/strategic, but many are of the battles and often with two maps per battle, each with a scale and accompanying text on the same page –…

◗ Thomas Anderson ◗ Osprey (2023) ◗ £35 ◗ 288 pages (hardback) ◗ ISBN:9781472855022 ◗ ospreypublishing.com The latest offering in this excellent Osprey series is on the German armoured reconnaissance units of WWII. Like its predecessors, this has superb photos (many from the author’s own collection) of a wide range of equipment, including prototypes and with a good coverage of all periods and particularly early-war and even prewar vehicles. Of particular benefit for wargamers will be the very detailed TO&E (Tables of Organisation and Equipment), at battalion, company and platoon levels, throughout the whole period. There are also good tactical summaries – ‘Lessons Learned’ – ranging from minor tactics to the deployment of a whole battalion across 50km or more of a division’s front. I am not about to teach…

◗ Martin Sheppard ◗ Pen & Sword (2022) ◗ £25.00 ◗ 320 pages (hardback) ◗ ISBN:9781399089982 ◗ pen-and-sword.co.uk Subtitled: The Life and Letters of the Commander of the Heavy Brigade at Balaklava, this book has a two-page listing of the illustrations, four pages listing people and places mentioned in the text and – with the author’s Introduction – it begin this account of the life and military career of James Scarlett, based upon his letters and those of family members as he kept no journal and wrote no memoirs. The chapter devoted to the Battle of Balaklava concentrates upon the Charge of the Heavy Brigade, commanded by Scarlett, but also gives concise accounts of the repulse of Russian cavalry by the 93rd Foot and the Charge of the Light Brigade.…

THE JUNE REBELLION 5 – 5 JUNE 1831 The Paris uprising (Insurrection républicaine à Paris) that inspired Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables began when reform-minded republicans mounted an insurrection to overturn France’s two-year-old constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe I. It took three days for national troops to quell the uprising. Nearly 1,000 casualties resulted. Sparked by the death (from cholera) of Jean Maximilien Lamarque, a popular former Army commander and parliamentarian, the riots that followed his funeral began the insurrection. After the fighting had ceased a large number of weapons were confiscated in raids, and there were fears that martial law would be imposed. The government, which had come to power in a revolution, distanced itself from its own revolutionary past.…

MAD DOGS ◗ caliverbooks.com ◗ £16.50 Caliver Books have produced an updated version of Jon Sutherland’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen rules. These are MD&E Wargamng India 1798 – 1859 and, indeed, you can see the first in a series of articles detailing the Cawnpore 1857 campaign on page 22 of this very issue. The first edition of these rules catered for colonial wargaming across a fairly long time-line and in multiple different theatres however this new subsidiary volume is pared back to just India alone. However what it does do is it covers conflicts in that locale across about six decades: effectively from the 4th Anglo-Mysore War to the Indian Mutiny. It’s in soft back, full-colour A5 format and the main rules themselves take up only around thirty pages, all…

IBERIAN PLAIN ◗ deepcutstudio.com ◗ 32.90€ - 97.90€ Deep Cut Studios have a new mat release (or two). We haven’t seen the Icy Water mat in reality (although it looks very nice with a deep blue and underlying cracked ice) but what we have as a sample for review is the excellent Iberian Plains mat. When grass on a mat is too lusciously green and sand on its own is just to ‘desert’ like, what you need is something a little more universal and this is an excellent middle ground. The Iberian Plains design has an interesting mix of both sandy soil and grass making it just a great ‘compromise’ mat. What’s interesting is that the mat surface itself looks like a photograph of an actual flocked and sanded piece…

◗ Jonathan Davies ◗ Helion (2022) ◗ £29.95 ◗ 296 pages (softback) ◗ ISBN:9781915070289 ◗ helion.co.uk If they ever invent time travel, this book will be all you need to become a Tudor master-gunner – such is the extraordinary detail on cannon design, manufacture, usage and tactics, including all the associated paraphernalia on tools, transport, and men. The period saw major changes in gunnery, the key ones being in gunpowder through cheaper access to saltpetre, metallurgy, mathematics (especially trigonometry), and the writing of treatises on the Art. This could be a rather dry tome, but the author brings the subject to life by adroit touches of humour and a nice turn of phrase – for example, fixing a cannon’s problem by using ‘a hefty wallop’. It is also finely illustrated…

◗ David A. Wilson ◗ Helion (2021) ◗ £29.95 ◗ 156 pages (hardback) ◗ ISBN:9781913336592 ◗ helion.co.uk This large format A4 softback, Number 61 in Helion’s From Reason to Revolution 1721-1815 series (and subtitled Volume 3: Norwegian Troops – Cavalry and Artillery) continues David Wilson’s study of the organisation, uniforms and equipment of the Danish Army that began in Number 48 with the High Command, Line and Light Infantry, which I have previously reviewed in these pages. Six sections of text accompanied by full-page colour plates cover the organisation, equipment, harness and tack of the Danish Regular Cavalry; the uniforms, helmets, swords and shabraques of the Royal Horse Guards; the uniforms, swords and shabraques of the Heavy Cavalry; the uniforms, swords, helmets and shabraques of the Dragoons and Light Cavalry…

◗ Dilip Sarkar; and Danny Burt ◗ Pen and Sword (2023) ◗ £25; and £22 ◗ 218, and 252, pages (hardbacks) ◗ ISBN:9781399065368 & 9781399017862 ◗ pen-and-sword.co.uk The first of these two titles is an album of the faces of around 200 British fighter aircrew in the battle of Britain, sometimes including a photo from their retirement days. Each photo has a short caption describing their role and a brief history: the youth of so many of them is striking (and moving). The ‘Mosquito’ title is a very entertaining account of the wartime experiences, both in the air and on the station, of a well-respected and somewhat free-spirited night fighter ace. It is a good mix of personal anecdotes and tactical snippets, with a healthy attitude to excessive bureaucracy: his…

◗ Robert Forczyk ◗ Osprey (2023) ◗ £35 ◗ 336 pages (hardback) ◗ ISBN:9781472851888 ◗ ospreypublishing.com This is a superb account of the first half of the WWII North Africa campaign, sub-titled Beda Fomm to Operation Crusader but in fact covering the previous minor actions too. A second volume will cover the remainder of the campaign, so the first third of the book provides a very helpful technical, organisational, doctrinal and tactical background to the Italian, British, German and US armoured forces. The author is a former armour officer as well as having a range of Osprey titles under his belt. A major benefit of this current volume is the wealth of research into daily tank strengths (by type) at key stages, so wargamers of this campaign can replicate exact…

Heart of Oak Geoff wrote an interesting scenario in Issue 480 and I asked him a little about his background. Ed. My first encounter with miniatures, though I didn’t know it at the time, was a pack of Citadel Combat Cards intended to entertain me on a long car journey. I was already mad for all things fantasy and spent that holiday gazing at them in wonder, arranging them into ‘armies’ and trying to draw my own copies of the pictures. I must have been 6 or 7 years old. I couldn’t work out if they were incredible paintings or photographs of statues… I was to discover they were both! Shortly afterwards my cousin brought his Heroquest set to my grandparents’ house for Christmas. After losing me to it for the entire day…